Word: muslims
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...wheelers, their miniskirts grazing their upper thighs. Sometimes, certain Vespa Girls wore no underwear. Today's UI, still the state-run breeding ground for the nation's future leaders, is a very different place. Half the female student body striding across the campus near Jakarta wear the jilbab, a Muslim scarf that covers the head and neck. Student politics is dominated by the Campus Propagation Institute, an Islamic group that offers religious mentoring and encourages students to adhere to Shari'a, or Islamic law. Female faculty in the Department of Medicine, irrespective of their religion, are barred from wearing short...
...Indonesia matters. The battle for its soul is taking place within a wider war in the Islamic world pitting progressive Muslims, who believe their faith can coexist with modernity and liberal Western influences, against fundamentalists, who want the religion to return to its more austere Arab roots. What happens in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, could presage the direction other Islamic societies take. Over the past four years, dozens of regencies-provincial subdivisions-across Indonesia have used the more permissive political climate to implement Shari'a-based bylaws that include bans on alcohol and prohibitions on women...
...these religious institutions preach the Salafi strain of Islam, which advocates a return to the religion as practiced in the era of the Prophet Muhammad. (Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia's strict form of the faith, is considered an offshoot of Salafi Islam.) By contrast, most Indonesians, like other Southeast Asian Muslims, had for centuries practiced a far less orthodox faith, incorporating the Hindu, Buddhist and animist traditions that had flourished before Islam arrived in the archipelago in the 12th century. Some 88% of Indonesia's 245 million citizens are Muslim, and the vast majority of those would label themselves as moderate...
...separation of mosque and state. Those secular underpinnings, say some legal experts, call into question the very constitutionality of the Shari'a bylaws. But the administration of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has sidestepped this debate. Vice President Jusuf Kalla calls the faith-based regulations "normal" in a Muslim-majority state, insisting: "It is not Shari'a law but laws influenced by Shari'a." Yudhoyono himself has avoided any public comment on the bylaws' legality. "The President will do nothing on this because he is scared of offending the Islamic movement," says former Indonesian President and moderate Muslim cleric Abdurrahman...
...what exactly constitutes true Islam in Indonesia? Is it a mystical tradition based on centuries of syncretic practice or an Arab-inspired move toward the religion's 7th century roots? How this debate plays out will dictate just what kind of a Muslim democracy the world's fourth most populous nation aims to be. "I believe we must strengthen the moderate paradigm and say that our Islam stands for tolerance, dynamism and freedom of expression," says Zuhairi Misrawi, a researcher with the Indonesian Society for Pesantren and Community Development in Jakarta. "But is that what the majority of Indonesian people...